Teen fire videos a troubling trend on YouTube, study says

Teen fire videos a troubling trend on YouTube, study says

One of the videos depicts teenagers setting ablaze various parts of their own clothing, another shows giggling youth creating fiery explosions, while still more feature boys dousing various objects with accelerants before gleefully igniting them.“It’s no good unless someone gets hurt,” concludes a participant in one.

YouTube is replete with such home-made, widely viewed clips portraying dangerous fire-setting behaviour — which a new Canadian study suggests might be exacerbating an already serious arson problem among young people.

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The impact of the short movies is unclear, but they have certainly caught the attention of an unusual sub-set of troubled youth, notes the study. A growing number of clients in the arson prevention program for children at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) report watching the videos, the researchers say.

Raymond Corrado, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, compared them to the online recordings of fights and other violence that have also become commonplace recently, and worries they could have a “contagion” effect among like-minded children.

“Does it add a new wrinkle to the challenges that parents and officials, police and teachers and the rest of us face? I would definitely say so,” said Prof. Corrado, who was not involved in the study. “It’s a new sort of variable in our trying to understand young people and criminal behaviours and violent behaviours.”

While the phenomenon garners relatively little public attention, juvenile fire setting and arson take a considerable toll, notes the paper by scientists at CAMH, just published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Statistics for Canada are hard to come by, but U.S. authorities say child fire starters were behind 56,300 of the blazes reported to American fire departments from 2005 to 2009, resulting in 110 civilian deaths, 880 civilian injuries and $268-million in property damage.

About half of those children were five years old or younger, according to the Juvenile Fire Starter Intervention Program in Illinois.

Some, mainly children under seven, play with fire out of curiosity, and generally fail to understand its destructive potential, the program says. Others, typically aged over five, act out because of emotional or mental disturbances, possibly triggered by a divorce, death or other crisis in their lives.

The authors of the Toronto article said they set out to explore what was available on YouTube after hearing from a number of clients who had viewed videos on the Net.

The search term “fire, fun” turned up 27,200 clips, and the authors closely examined almost 50 of the most popular, they reported.

About three-quarters depicted “completely inappropriate” fire-related behaviour, like the video that shows male youths spraying some kind of aerosol accelerant on their clothes — including the crotch of one boy — then setting the clothing alight.

In fact, someone was set on fire in 16% of the clips, while a burn injury was clear in 10% and suspected in another 10%, the study found.

The videos seemed popular, with a third of them viewed more than 10,000 times, while 8% had over 100,000 hits, according to the paper.

It is a concern the material is so readily available to young people, probably with no parental oversight, said Steve Gamble, first vice president of the Canadian Association of Fire Chiefs.

“It’s just brought it more out in the open, more people share it, whereas when I was a kid, if someone did something bad, it was a very small group that saw it,” said Mr. Gamble, chief of the Langley Township fire department in B.C. “You worry about the ones who are on the borderline. Does this inspire them?”

In fact, whether electronic media influence young people to misbehave is an ongoing debate among experts, the CAMH researchers note, with some convinced media violence directly sparks aggressive behaviour, and others arguing that one never leads to the other.

Prof. Corrado said he believes such material is unlikely to motivate young people who are not predisposed in any way to playing with fire. The clips could, however, incite copy-cat acts among youth who already fit the profile for fire-setting behaviour, he said.